Editorial 23 August 2017

Belvoir’s Hir (image above) is a viscerally funny and deadly serious account of an imploding nuclear family reeling from the impact, among other things, of a transgender teenager. It’s a perfect parable for our times. After focusing on graduate and postgraduate artists in recent weeks in our ongoing Arts Education & Training Feature, we turn our attention to new works made by academics who are prominent artists, successfully practising from within and beyond the academy. Professor Cat Hope of Monash University talks with RealTime about the innovations that underpin her new opera, Speechless, and Dr Karen Pearlman of Macquarie University, discusses her new film about a pioneering editor, Woman with an Editing Bench, part of the filmmaker’s research into editing and cognition. Also in this edition, reviews of a cluster of bold productions — Hir, The Rape of Lucretia, Tectonic and The Hamlet Apocalypse — and Dan Edwards expresses doubts about the VR revolution. Not least, we commence our series of previews of the much anticipated 2017 OzAsia Festival.

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Top image credit: Richard Whalley, Greg Stone, Helen Thomson, Hir, Belvoir Street Theatre, photo Brett Boardman